Katya Mills

‘Solar Strike’

Soon it will be as though we never existed. I did the dishes and swept the floors and vacuumed the carpets and dusted the shelves and made the bed and paid the bills and put out the trash and wiped the counters and bleached the tub and sink … soon it will be as though I never was here. Inside the pillow the down is on the rebound, for I must go to work. The kittens chase shadows to the sound of classical music by the light of the closet. This is not the Harris waltz. I close the laptop. Silence. The glass cools my fingerprints as I begin to feel myself fearful, deadnamed, unseen. Like we’re not used to it! Our houses and possessions, what will they do without us? Spiders waiting for someone to open the door. How will the things inside continue to live, after they stamp our passports?
 
Someone will come. And then the gods of destitution, financial and economic futility. I find myself back in that different life, like a dream now – was it real? – helpless and hustling …  mixed in with the street level decay, perhaps unappealing to the eye; a vibrant if desperate life demanding all of one’s innate qualities be brought to forefront without notice. The very same things gone dormant for hours upon hours behind locked doors at home, behind books, behind screens, behind bars. Comfort was comfortable for a moment before it murdered you.
 
We know how to survive this. It happened once before! I urge myself out of bed, off the couch, away from the screens, the worrying thoughts. Denying opportunities to hide and plant myself and vegetate and tremble. The clinging vines of pharmaceutical quality carry mental and emotional co-paid vacations in headphones … hailstones getting bigger, they pummel us into the ground … fragments of brain lying in shards of glass and ice with lottery tickets, eye candy, ear candy. The willows weep for us.
 
I urge myself away, back into the self-generating energies, warrior pose. What we left behind us comes back again, radiating like a solar storm, striking. My glasses shatter. I grope across the keyboard. How to say it? My heart frozen in my chest and I nudge it toward a thaw, urgent for a season, decidedly optimistic in the atheistic static. All the gods slap my face with all their many hands, and I wake up out of blue, misgendered, to thank you.
 
I make myself a solar-powered sail, a foil, a blackness to absorb, a whiteness to reflect. I reshape my attitude into a redemptive puffy cloud heaving water, then rise above it all: floating, singing the screams, vomiting terror, rubbing confusion out of my eyes, into enlightenment. Then look blindly into space. Thank you. I hate you life full of suffering. Use me. Abuse me. I love you. I will not forget you. Regret you. They cannot will us out of existence! You made us like only you know how.